If you've been a long time follower, you'd know that I was the biggest AI skeptic.
I didn't understand it. I liked how I did things. I mean, if it worked, why fix it, right?
My mind changed once I joined Vercel back in 2024.
The team were just shipping the new version of v0 and I watched the community come equipped with all the questions across platforms. The only way to help them was to fully understand the product by actually building.
Unsurprisingly, I got hooked to "vibe coding". I started to enjoy sharing my tips on better prompting and my little side projects with our users. My AI toolkit grew: I used v0, Cursor and occasstionally ChatGPT and Gemini daily.
Over the last two weeks, Claude Code was trending on X and everyone around me seemed to be building agents. I watched a couple of demos, and thought about all the things that I'd love a virtual assistant to help me with.
Today it has become the tool for me when it comes to development work. I've shipped code (and my ideas!) faster than I have ever done in years.
It's also just been super fun, because it feels like I'm back in my hackathon days where the only limit is your imagination and I guess the 24 hours 😂
This weekend I wanted to play around a bit more with some agents I'd already started building and remembered that I had this "move off WordPress" project I've been putting off for months...
Claude Code handled it all in a single session.
The migration
For context, the front end of my blog has been running on Next.js, but it was still fetching all the content from WordPress via their REST API. Before this set-up, I was all-in with WordPress and...was developing on /shudders/ PHP.
My set up was unnecessarily complex: EC2 instance on AWS and Next.js app on Vercel.
Every time I wanted to publish a post I had to go into my laggy WordPress instance to publish and I often hit API timeouts during builds.
When something broke, it was frustrating not knowing which dependency it was that caused it. 😬
Watching Claude plan and execute code was so fun. I didn't just use Claude as a chatbot. I used it as a terminal agent. I gave it a high-level goal:
Extract all posts from my WordPress REST API, convert them to MDX with proper frontmatter, and save them into a year-based folder structure.
It handled the rate-limiting on the API, parsed the messy HTML into clean Markdown, and even re-ran the script when it found a character encoding error.
It migrated all 367 posts and 5 pages to local MDX files stored in the repo. Here's what that means:
content/
├── posts/
│ ├── 2015/
│ ├── 2016/
│ ├── ...
│ └── 2026/
│ └── migrating-from-wordpress.mdx
├── pages/
│ ├── about.mdx
│ └── vault.mdx
└── categories.json
Each post is now a markdown file with frontmatter:
---
title: "Post Title"
date: "2026-01-31"
categories: ["Tech"]
excerpt: "Brief description"
author: "Pauline"
slug: "post-slug"
---
Your content here...
All my images are now optimized through Next.js Image optimization. Every image gets:
- Automatic WebP/AVIF conversion
- Lazy loading
- Responsive sizing
- CDN caching
And because the content is local, I can now do things like:
- Bulk find-and-replace across all posts
- Version control on content changes
- Automated content processing
- Git-based workflows
Technical stack
| FEATURE | BEFORE | AFTER |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Next.js + WordPress API | Next.js + Local MDX |
| Hosting | EC2 / AWS Management | Zero config on Vercel |
| Performance | Slow builds / API timeouts | Instant local builds |
| Search | WordPress native search | FlexSearch |
| Effort | 3-5 days of manual labor | 4 hours with Claude Code |
The future of development
Here's what gets me excited: this entire migration happened in one afternoon.
Just me, Claude Code, and a clear goal.
I gave it the plan, and it executed autonomously:
- Installed dependencies
- Created migration scripts
- Converted all 367 posts
- Updated application code
- Fixed content issues
- Optimized images
- Tested builds
- Pushed to GitHub
- Shipped to Vercel
All while I was doing other things.
At one point, the migration stalled because some old WordPress posts had broken image tags. Instead of me hunting through 300 files, Claude detected the build error, wrote a regex fix, applied it across the entire directory, and tried the build again.
For someone who's been coding since I was 8 and has watched the industry evolve, this feels like the most significant shift I've experienced.
We're not just coding anymore; we're orchestrating.
If you're running a similar setup, and wondering what an alternative is - I hope this helped!
AI is very fun and I'm optimistic about the future of development.